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IT Jobs With the Best (and Worst) ROI
Nerval's Lobster writes: Over at Dice, there's a breakdown of which tech jobs have the greatest return on investment, with regard to high starting salaries and growth potential relative to how much you need to spend on degrees and certifications. Which jobs top this particular calculation? No shockers here: DBAs, software engineers, programmers, and Web developers all head up the list, with salaries that tick into six-figure territory. How about those with the worst ROI? Graphic designers, sysadmins, tech support, and software QA testers often present a less-than-great combination of relatively little money and room for advancement, even if you possess a four-year degree or higher, unless you're one of the lucky few.
"Over at Dice...[...]"
Since when is that "somewhere else"? Any submission of news from Dice lacks any credibility... and puff piece articles like this aren't worth anyone's time at the best of time.
Nonsense. Job titles in IT are just "guidelines" as for your job duties and job duties are what decide salaries once you've become established at a company. I've seen "sys admins" who wrote C++ code all day long for various system tools and got paid well into 6 figures for it. I've seen DBA's who spend there days building systems and configuring various components of the server who also make 6 figures. I think the bottom line is generally that you need to have multiple strong skill sets and to find ways to apply these various skills at your job. A quick story that probably has no real merit: A linux admin at my current job got saddled with trying to get the microsoft system suite to do a few fancier things in terms of configuration management. This means that he had to write a few dozen modules in C++ to get the right data placed into the microsoft suite. He makes well into 6 figures (we're drinking buds). Talent + effort + correct company == high pay.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Tell that to the HR drones or the managers who see people as interchangeable biological units.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The DBA probably gets paid a lot because the company is desperate for someone to come in and fix the database after the developers thought they could do the job themselves.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Money seems a bad metric to choose a job. Once it pays enough, having an interesting job is quite important, since you are going to spend at least 8 hours a day at it. Job security can also be another important point: who cares a high wage if you are going to be fired within 2 years and remain unemployed after that (hint: another technological bubble exploded)
Ditto. Where I work we've gone through cycles of having devs design DB changes and implement procs only to go back to stricter guidelines once the DBAs have to get engaged in performance issues. In cases where a high performing application is a must, a DBA is essential.
If you did not make it up the IT ladder, some of it may be your manager(s) fault but I'd say even without knowing you, it was more than likely yours. I started at my current company as a Tier 2 tech in one of our regional offices making roughly 50K/yr. I was a desktop admin, a network admin, a systems engineer, I expanded into VM and then storage, and eventually voice and networking, now eleven years later I am the infrastructure manager sitting over 7 engineers in our world wide operation and my salary has tripled. I am still physically in the same regional office and 6 of my 7 guys are are not even in my physical office, they are spread across two different offices, most at our headquarters. My situation is not unique. Many of us have worked our way up but also.. a person that started 2 months after me in the same regional office is still here and still a regional Tier 2 tech.
If anyone in your company doing IT is getting promoted and it is not you, don't blame the other guy. If the situation is "bad" and people have it out for you, then go somewhere else and try again. Don't blame others for you not getting promoted. Those engineers and managers at your current company did not start at 20 as senior engineers and managers. They did it somehow. Take responsibility for your career or be happy and comfortable where you are, that is your choice. Just don't complain about a choice YOU made.
Sure, of course. It's why I used the qualifier "most" and "typically". And that's also why I mentioned that if the professions themselves aren't certified, then it may be the products themselves. I have no idea about the specifics of your industry, but I'd bet your company's products have to get certified by the FAA.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The DBA probably gets paid a lot because the company is desperate for someone to come in and fix the database after the developers thought they could do the job themselves.
This.
Sincerely, a DBA.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Certification is all very well and good when most people in the profession are doing the same thing and the state of the art is advancing relatively slowiy.
One the other hand, one of the IT professional organizations of the 1970s attempted to create the concept of a "Certified Data Processor" (CDP).
I have a copy of a CDP exam prep guide. Not many things in it are even possible any more. Reading punch cards by eye, knowledge of COBOL program organization, mainframe JCL - the stuff that isn't flat-out obsolete is really niche these days. Few RoR programmers know JCL. People who Java well aren't usually also top-tier .Net experts. Some people work intensively with Struts, but more don't. And that's not counting system expertise like how to endure the Windows Registry or run dtrace on Linux.
Sure we have dozens of domain-specific certs in IT. Most of them carry little or no weight. There's no general cert that defines your overall competence or lack thereof.
The only hope for professional certification would be if someone could devise an exam sufficiently abstract to work in all major variants of an IT discipline, regardless of OS, language or platform. So far, no one has done that.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, manage.
Those who can't manage, administrate.
What a load of unsubstantiated ideological crock.